Burns delivers call to action: ‘Set things right again’
Worthy of a read of (or if you want a listen to) a recent Commencement speech given by Ken Burns at Washington University calling on recent graduates to help fix what previous generations have left broken and incomplete. I have posted both the verbal and the written version for you to select.
A comment extracted from the speech:
“a tall, thin lawyer, prone to bouts of debilitating depression, addressed the Young Men’s Lyceum. The topic that day was national security. He asked his audience
“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the Earth and crush us at a blow?”
Then he answered his own question.
“Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio [River] or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
It is a stunning, remarkable statement.”
Ken Burns answers what is wrong with America and why we have not been able to get it right after the Civil War and during Reconstruction.
“You’re joining a movement that must be dedicated above all else — career and personal advancement — to the preservation of this country’s most enduring ideals. You have to learn, and then re-teach the rest of us that equality — real equality — is the hallmark and birthright of ALL Americans. Thankfully, you will become a vanguard against a new separatism that seems to have infected our ranks, a vanguard against those forces that, in the name of our great democracy, have managed to diminish it.”
~~~~~~~~
Burns delivers call to action to Class of 2015: “Set things right again,” Washington University, May 15, 2015
The Text: Chancellor Wrighton, members of the Board of Trustees and the Administration, distinguished faculty, Class of 1965, hard-working staff, my fellow honorees, proud and relieved parents, calm and serene grandparents, distracted but secretly pleased siblings, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, graduating students, good morning. I am deeply honored that you have asked me here to say a few words at this momentous occasion, that you might find what I have to say worthy of your attention on so important a day at this remarkable institution.
It had been my intention this morning to parcel out some good advice at the end of these remarks — the “goodness” of that being of course subjective in the extreme — but then I realized that this is the land of Mark Twain, and I came to the conclusion that any commentary today ought to be framed in the sublime shadow of this quote of his: “It’s not that the world is full of fools, it’s just that lightening isn’t distributed right.” More on Mr. Twain later.
I am in the business of history. It is my job to try to discern some patterns and themes from the past to help us interpret our dizzyingly confusing and sometimes dismaying present. Without a knowledge of that past, how can we possibly know where we are and, most important, where we are going? Over the years I’ve come to understand an important fact, I think: that we are not condemned to repeat, as the cliché goes and we are fond of quoting, what we don’t remember. That’s a clever, even poetic phrase, but not even close to the truth. Nor are there cycles of history, as the academic community periodically promotes. The Bible, Ecclesiastes to be specific, got it right, I think:
“What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun.”
What that means is that human nature never changes. Or almost never changes. We have continually superimposed our complex and contradictory nature over the random course of human events. All of our inherent strengths and weaknesses, our greed and generosity, our puritanism and our prurience parade before our eyes, generation after generation after generation. This often gives us the impression that history repeats itself. It doesn’t. It just rhymes, Mark Twain is supposed to have said…but he didn’t (more on Mr. Twain later.)
Over the many years of practicing, I have come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events (even cogent commencement quotes) that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. It is a mysterious and malleable thing. And each generation rediscovers and re-examines that part of its past that gives its present, and most important, its future new meaning, new possibilities and new power.
Listen. For most of the forty years I’ve been making historical documentaries, I have been haunted and inspired by a handful of sentences from an extraordinary speech I came across early in my professional life by a neighbor of yours just up the road in Springfield, Illinois. In January of 1838, shortly before his 29th birthday, a tall, thin lawyer, prone to bouts of debilitating depression, addressed the Young Men’s Lyceum. The topic that day was national security.
“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?” he asked his audience . . . . Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the Earth and crush us at a blow?”
Then he answered his own question:
“Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa . . . could not by force take a drink from the Ohio [River] or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years . . . If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
It is a stunning, remarkable statement.
That young man was, of course, Abraham Lincoln, and he would go on to preside over the closest this country has ever come to near national suicide, our Civil War, fought over the meaning of freedom in America. And yet embedded in his extraordinary, disturbing and prescient words is a fundamental optimism that implicitly acknowledges the geographical force-field two mighty oceans and two relatively benign neighbors north and south have provided for us since the British burned the White House in the War of 1812.
We have counted on Abraham Lincoln for more than a century and a half to get it right when the undertow in the tide of those human events has threatened to overwhelm and capsize us. We always come back to him for the kind of sustaining vision of why we Americans still agree to cohere, why unlike any other country on earth, we are still stitched together by words and, most important, their dangerous progeny, ideas. We return to him for a sense of unity, conscience and national purpose. To escape what the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said is our problem today:
“too much pluribus, not enough unum.”
It seems to me that he gave our fragile experiment a conscious shock that enabled it to outgrow the monumental hypocrisy of slavery inherited at our founding and permitted us all, slave owner as well as slave, to have literally, as he put it at Gettysburg, “a new birth of freedom.”
Lincoln’s Springfield speech also suggests what is so great and so good about the people who inhabit this lucky and exquisite country of ours (that’s the world you now inherit): our work ethic, our restlessness, our innovation and our improvisation, our communities and our institutions of higher learning, our suspicion of power; the fact that we seem resolutely dedicated to parsing the meaning between individual and collective freedom; that we are dedicated to understanding what Thomas Jefferson really meant when he wrote that inscrutable phrase “the pursuit of Happiness.”
But the isolation of those two mighty oceans has also helped to incubate habits and patterns less beneficial to us: our devotion to money and guns; our certainty — about everything; our stubborn insistence on our own exceptionalism, blinding us to that which needs repair, our preoccupation with always making the other wrong, at an individual as well as global level.
And then there is the issue of race, which was foremost on the mind of Lincoln back in 1838. It is still here with us today. The jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis told me that healing this question of race was what “the kingdom needed in order to be well.” Before the enormous strides in equality achieved in statutes and laws in the 150 years since the Civil War that Lincoln correctly predicted would come are in danger of being undone by our still imperfect human nature and by politicians who now insist on a hypocritical color-blindness — after four centuries of discrimination. That discrimination now takes on new, sometimes subtler, less obvious but still malevolent forms today. The chains of slavery have been broken, thank God, and so too has the feudal dependence of sharecroppers as the vengeful Jim Crow era recedes (sort of) into the distant past. But now in places like — but not limited to — your other neighbors a few miles as the crow flies from here in Ferguson, we see the ghastly remnants of our great shame emerging still, the shame Lincoln thought would lead to national suicide, our inability to see beyond the color of someone’s skin. It has been with us since our founding.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that immortal second sentence of the Declaration that begins,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…,”
He owned more than a hundred human beings. He never saw the contradiction, never saw the hypocrisy, and more important never saw fit in his lifetime to free any one of those human beings, ensuring as we went forward that the young United States, born with such glorious promise, would be bedeviled by race, that it would take a bloody, bloody Civil War to even begin to redress the imbalance.
But the shame continues: prison populations exploding with young black men, young black men killed almost weekly by policemen, whole communities of color burdened by corrupt municipalities that resemble more the predatory company store of a supposedly bygone era than a responsible local government. Our cities and towns and suburbs cannot become modern plantations.
It is unconscionable, as you emerge from this privileged sanctuary, that a few miles from here and nearly everywhere else in America: Baltimore, New York City, North Charleston, Cleveland, Oklahoma, Sanford, Florida, nearly everywhere else. We are still playing out, sadly, an utterly American story, that the same stultifying conditions and sentiments that brought on our Civil War are still on such vivid and unpleasant display. Today, today. There’s nothing new under the sun.
Many years after our Civil War, in 1883, Mark Twain took up writing in earnest a novel he had started and abandoned several times over the last half-dozen years. It would be a very different kind of story from his celebrated Tom Sawyer book, told this time in the plain language of his Missouri boyhood and it would be his masterpiece.
Set near here, before the Civil War and emancipation, ‘the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ is the story of two runaways. A white boy, Tom Sawyer’s old friend Huck, fleeing civilization, and a black man, Jim, who is running away from slavery. They escape together on a raft going down the Mississippi River.
The novel reaches its moral climax when Huck is faced with a terrible choice. He believes he has committed a grievous sin in helping Jim escape, and he finally writes out a letter, telling Jim’s owner where her runaway property can be found. Huck feels good about doing this at first, he says, and marvels at “how close I came to being lost and going to hell.”
But then he hesitates, thinking about how kind Jim has been to him during their adventure. “…Somehow,” Huck says, “I couldn’t seem to strike no place to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see how glad he was when I come back out of the fog;…and such like times; and would always call me honey…and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was…”
Then, Huck remembers the letter he has written.
“I took it up, and held it in my hand,” he says. “I was a-trembling because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right then, I’ll go to hell’ — and tore it up.”
That may be the finest moment in all of American literature. Ernest Hemingway thought all of American literature began at that moment.
Twain, himself, writing after the Civil War and after the collapse of Reconstruction, a misunderstood period devoted to trying to enforce civil rights, was actually expressing his profound disappointment that racial differences still persisted in America, that racism still festered in this favored land, founded as it was on the most noble principle yet advanced by humankind — that all men are created equal. That civil war had not cleansed our original sin, a sin we continue to confront today, daily, in this supposedly enlightened “post-racial” time.
It is into this disorienting and sometimes disappointing world that you now plummet, I’m afraid, unprotected from the shelter of family and school. You have fresh prospects and real dreams and I wish each and every one of you the very best. But I am drafting you now into a new Union Army that must be committed to preserving the values, the sense of humor, the sense of cohesion that have long been a part of our American nature, too. You have no choice, you’ve been called up, and it is your difficult, but great and challenging responsibility to help change things and set us right again.
Let me apologize in advance to you. We broke it, but you’ve got to fix it. You’re joining a movement that must be dedicated above all else, career and personal advancement, to the preservation of this country’s most enduring ideals. You have to learn, and then re-teach the rest of us that equality, real equality, is the hallmark and birthright of ALL Americans. Thankfully, you will become a vanguard against a new separatism that seems to have infected our ranks, a vanguard against those forces that, in the name of our great democracy, have managed to diminish it. Then, you can change human nature just a bit, to appeal, as Lincoln also implored us, to appeal to “the better angels of our nature.” That’s the objective. I know you can do it.
Ok. I’m rounding third.
Let me speak directly to the graduating class. (Watch out. Here comes the advice.)
Remember: Black lives matter. All lives matter.
Reject fundamentalism wherever it raises its ugly head. It’s not civilized. Choose to live in the Bedford Falls of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” not its oppressive opposite, Pottersville.
Do not descend too deeply into specialism. Educate all your parts. You will be healthier.
Replace cynicism with its old-fashioned antidote, skepticism.
Don’t confuse monetary success with excellence. The poet Robert Penn Warren once warned me that “careerism is death.”
Try not to make the other wrong.
Be curious, not cool.
Remember, insecurity makes liars of us all.
Listen to jazz. A lot. It is our music.
Read. The book is still the greatest man-made machine of all — not the car, not the TV, not the computer or the smartphone.
Do not allow our social media to segregate us into ever smaller tribes and clans, fiercely and sometimes appropriately loyal to our group, but also capable of metastasizing into profound distrust of the other.
Serve your country. By all means serve your country. But insist that we fight the right wars. Governments always forget that.
Convince your government that the real threat, as Lincoln knew, comes from within. Governments always forget that, too. Do not let your government outsource honesty, transparency or candor. Do not let your government outsource democracy.
Vote. Elect good leaders. When he was nominated in 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” We all deserve the former. Insist on it.
Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothing to do with the actual defense of the country — they just make the country worth defending.
Be about the “unum,” not the “pluribus.”
Do not lose your enthusiasm. In its Greek etymology, the word enthusiasm means simply, “God in us.”
And even though lightning still isn’t distributed right, try not to be a fool. It just gets Mark Twain riled up.
And if you ever find yourself in Huck’s spot, if you’ve “got to decide betwixt two things,” do the right thing. Don’t forget to tear up the letter. He didn’t go to hell — and you won’t either.
So we come to an end of something today—and for you also a very special beginning. God speed to you all.
Ken Burns Walpole, New Hampshire
Well, it’s interesting to me that however much we think we agree with Burns, we, right here in river city spew hate at just the hint that someone disagrees with us about the most trivial matter.
as for our “utterly American story”… I don’t think so. Racism has been with us since forever, in every country and every heart, black or white or all the shades between. even between white and white and black and black.
nor, i think, will “human nature” allow us to get very far with that instant hate when crossed or threatened or just told about it that i allude to in my first paragraph.
I believe, because I read “Father Abraham” ( Striner ) that Lincoln did care a great deal about slavery and even steered the Civil War in a way that ended slavery. But I don’t think he was lying when he said the war was about preserving the Union, whether he freed all slaves or some slaves or no slaves. It may be that preserving the Union was some kind of mindless “patriotism” or it may be that the realities of power in the world told Lincoln that the destruction of the Union would harm us all in the end. And of course it had everything to do with slavery… because the leaders of the South could see the end of their particular way of getting rich in the inevitable development of the economy of the North (just as the leaders of the North could see the inevitable destruction of their way of getting rich from giving in to the slave-aristocracy’s demands for “free use of their property” …
no need to go on, except to suggest that it’s harder than you think. and watch out for that spewing hate. someone else tried to point that out to us. we crucified him. and still go crazy with hate when someone mentions his name because we all know the evils committed in his name. we learned them in school.
Racial equality? After I explained the decades of decline into the American wage slave market, my brother John remarked: “Martin Luther King got his people on the [economic] up escalator just in time for it to start going down for everybody.”
Judge Robert Bork wrote that the French Revolution was based on ideals (like Mr. Burns’): liberty, equality, fraternity. He compared the longevity of the French with the American Revolution which he said was based on a realistic assessment of human nature — that people were always going to be at each others throats for their own benefit — and which understood checks and balances as the only realistic path to communal justice.
When an employer fires an employee who wants to join or organize a shop, he not only deprives the employee of a job but also of the economic — and political — sinews necessary to defend themselves against competing interests. The latter is the real crime.
You can go to jail for taking movies in the movies or for polluting a river. It should be a crime to bust unions. Employees can find another (just as lousy paying) job but where are they going to find another fair society (emigrate to Denmark)?
Too much money is involved for racial discrimination level, civil penalties to have any kind of deterrence. Firing one organizer works as atomically as a massive lockout with no inconvenience at all to the employer. One employer may feel forced to union bust if the competitor down the road does it. Got to have criminal level labor market sanctions if we are ever going to reclaim American civilization.
Big improvement over Tony La Russa, last year’s speaker.
I believe it was true that back then in 1863 slavery made up about 75% of GDP of America. Yes free labor is what was driving the world long before America. Unfortunately we were one of the last to let go of slavery that started probably even before the Egyptians. Now flash forward to today big corporations in general still pursuit the cheapest labor possible by choosing to send our jobs overseas with out any penalty to the society they exist in . Yes the are allowed to hide profits with loop holes and exploit much the same way as slave owners did back then. To me it is nothing more than modern slavery only the exploitation and abuses do not see ,nor care to see any color this time. They will exploit the entire American workforce until we have extremely low labor participation and utilization rates as we currently have. It is the government that decided who was going to be allowed to be winners and losers here. They decided that the unchecked corporations have human rights and would be allowed to proceed unchecked with their modern slavery agendas that so many liked so much every time they shopped at Wal-Mart or bought a foreign car.
“Reject fundamentalism wherever it raises its ugly head. It’s not civilized. Choose to live in the Bedford Falls of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” not its oppressive opposite, Pottersville. “
Is the rejection of fundamentalism not at the core of the moral decay; which has led us to live in Pottersville? For without moral values we except the rightness of too big to fail, or trade deals that only serve Potter.
thanks run,
As you see – it is hard to scrutinize the trees and then integrate them into a forest. The trees reveal all the diseases and pests but, in order to survive, the forest must be made healthy. We are good at the “one tree at a time” but not good (anymore) at making the forest as a whole healthy. So while we think we solve a fundamental problem the culture comes up with a life preserver for the problem. Solutions and health (freedom and democracy) not allowed.
Interesting though – what do you think about his insertion of careerism, a value strongly emphasized when I was a child, as a negative. I think maybe I agree if I knew what he, himself, was thinking.
Ultimately though, is a speech like this any more than just a timely exploitive perspective of current events?
Anna Lee:
I did nothing but pick up on what I saw as a relevant speech today as given to young graduates.
It could be an exploitative perspective of current events; but, what better person than to apply today’s events as seen through the eyes of sometime who looks to our history? I thin he hit what is happening in the US and has been happening since Columbus came. Just to put it in a better perspective and maybe Jack D will correct my legal interpretation if I get it wrong. Not quite a lawyer yet; but, I am dangerous. This is something I wrong to a bigot:
Which is why during Reconstruction, newly minted black citizens were granted protection under the auspice of the 14th Amendment by the Federal Government, they were successful in achieving the results through elections after their newly won freedom.
Oh wait a minute, I made a mistake. It appears down in the town of Colfax in Grant Parish LA, the white population of that Parish and of LA did not take kindly to the results of the election for the LA Governor. Indeed, the white vigilante’s attacked the black freedmen and state militia and the ensuing massacre led to >100 dead. ahh; but there is more!
The election results were reversed and the white attacker’s candidate seated. A few of the attackers were taken to court under the Enforcement Act and prosecuted. The case was appealed to the Waite SCOTUS and United States v. Cruikshank was the result.
“protections of the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to the actions of individuals, but only to the actions of state governments. After this ruling, the federal government could no longer use the Enforcement Act of 1870 to prosecute actions by paramilitary groups such as the White League (which had chapters forming across Louisiana beginning in 1874), Red Shirts, etc.” which operated openly.
Intimidation and black voter suppression by such paramilitary groups were instrumental in regaining political control in the state legislature by the late 1870s by those who opposed Reconstruction. But of course, the Honorable State of LA stepped in to protect the rights of black citizens? Of course they did after taking control of the Legislature, they moved forward with Jim Crow.
Now what does this have to do with today’s scenario and you? Not only did those, those, those bigots suppress the rights of citizens to retain their authority; they took it a step further after being granted the ability to determine their future under a “state rights” mantra by passing laws limiting the ability of citizens different then they to have the same rights they. Sound familiar like amendments to state constitutions, etc. A similar environment exists today for gay and people of different beliefs outside of the accepted norm. You can play it up as much as you want to; but, I doubt you (not you Anna) have their best interest at heart.
Whether through the legislature or though state courts with their appointed or duly elected judges typically have no interest in protecting the rights of minorities unless beaten over the head soundly by the Federal Gov. There exist numerous examples of states and their respective citizens being forced accept the rights of others.
So you got married so you can file a joint tax return and it sounds like you are not to happy with the choice too. What are you afraid of? Maybe a gay couple might move next door to you? or sit next to you in a three seat airplane? Thanks for the laugh!
Let me cite another post of mine and how everything has helped the people of Detroit succeed. I hope you have time to read it. http://angrybearblog.strategydemo.com/2015/04/the-continued-demise-of-detroit-under-governor-synder-and-michigan.html What is occurring is very real, not to be imagined, and has been occurring for decades. It never really disappeared.
Yes, we immersed ourselves in our careers and technology forgetting the values we struggled so hard to advance in the sixties and seventies. We sold out as it is easy to be rich in dollar value and forget the other values. When I was wandering through U of M Hospital for almost three weeks of boredom getting better. I constantly had to watch the people walking towards me as they fingered and thumbed their cell phones staring intently at them. It mattered to me where they walked and if it was into me. Look up sir . . . If they knocked me over, I could bleed to death from an internal wound. Put down your cell phones, see what is around you, and smell the air. Puppies, kittens, and kids are just young once
anna lee
trouble is, as i see it, “careerism” destroys souls, that is, it destroys your ability to enjoy the best things of life. of course if your idea of the best things of life is a trip to Las Vegas, then…well, at the least, the world you have created is destroying everything that makes life worth living for the rest of us.
but, if you don’t have a career, don’t have money, you will become, unless you are very lucky and very clever, one of the victims, and grinding poverty will destroy your soul.
please note “soul” here is not some “religious” word. it’s just the best word i know of to mean “a kind of sanity.”
which calls for a note to beene: beene, i am sure that “fundamentalisme” works for you.. a kind of guard against the world going to hell, literally. in some respects i agree. but “fundamentalism” also implys a narrowness of thought that tries to impose itself on others who may actually have a saner view of things. and there are all sorts of fundamentalists not just “religious” fundamentalists, but even, ah, “anti-religious” fundamentalists. and, god knows, i have watched the sons of the enlightenment rip innocent human beings to shreds in the pursuit of their idealistic purity. jesus himself taught against that, but there are those who “in his name” teach intolerance and “taking their adversaries to court” (note to joel, that is not an exact quote).
there doesn’t seem to be any magic formula for avoiding all this, and i suspect the problem is because Darwin was right all along. still, it’s worth making the effort.
Burns’ mistake, in my opinion, is laying it off on the younger generation. It’s up to all of us. The fact that we’ve blown it in the past doesn’t mean we have to keep blowing it.
Jack:
Maybe you and I are just getting too old to have much impact going into the future even though we agree we too must do something. he burden will be carried by those who come later. Hopefully, they do not sacrifice us to the volcano.
JackD
probably i am oversentitive on the issue, but what i don’t like about “we broke it” is that it’s too much like the Big Liars going around and telling “the young” that their greedy grannies have stolen their money from them.
and whatever Burns may have meant I guarantee there are people who will understand him this way.
and while its a fine thing to warn the kids to resist racism and religious intolerance, i can guarantee that many of them will go around telling themselves they are not racists or religious nuts so it’s okay for them to hate the scotch irish and the christians.
Beene, “Is the rejection of fundamentalism not at the core of the moral decay;”[?]
You seem to be attributing moral values to fundamentalism. Why so? Fundamentalism is an internalized ideology, a part of the individual’s personal belief system. Morality is an internal ideal, but it is exhibited by way of the individual’s behavior and interactions with the environment. Why the assumption that these two characteristics of a person’s internalized self can’t be contradictory?
Jack
maybe, but let me have a whack at this.
“fundamentalism” … i assume we are talking about current “christian fundamentalism” is roughly a believe in the inerrant word of the Bible… as interpreted by fundamentalist preachers. it is, no doubt, “internalized,” but people being what they are, it is the “external” form that determines in part what is internalized. and as an external form it exerts some pressure on people to conform, as best they can, to what they believe it says.
i don’t think that Beene would accept that the internal norm and the external behavior can be “contradictory” except by mistake or by in fact not holding the believe or by choosing to act against it. while these may happen, they don’t negate the power the public norm has in shaping behavior. moreover, i suspect he thinks that he has an obligation to try to convince the rest of us to obey that public norm. this offends the hell out of some people, but it is really no different from your, or my, attempting to influence the behavior and beliefs of anyone who, for example, reads what we write right here.
you very likely think that “your religion is your personal business, leave me out of it.” but in fact “religion”… not even the anti religion so popular today… has ever been “private business.” we are, like it or not, members of a tribe and we know that the beliefs and behavior of other members of the tribe have a lot to do with our own well being, whether we believe that is enforced by “god” or the ballot box.
personally, these days, i have a lot more faith in “god” than i have in the ballot box. and that may not be a religious confession. people… except bankers and politicians…. tend to believe in and behave according to the values they learned, one way or another, from their tribe. and that may be a better restraint on their behavior than the laws they pay congress to enact. [implied here is my belief that you got your morals from a long line of folk who got theirs from a long line of “preachers”, not, of course, that all of them were members of a recognized “religion.” but a lot of them were.
Yesterday I went to a niece’s graduation in which, under a hot sun, in folding chairs on a quad, we heard speech after speech, before and after 590 college graduates had their names pronounced (or mis-pronounced). There was something good in each of the speeches but all of them were too long, in my opinion. Also, in my opinion, there has to be a better way in this technological age to get through such ceremonies (which took about 3 hours, for total of about 1.6 person-years). Okay, it’s not the worst experience I’ve ever had and I don’t begrudge the three hours – much. And maybe some of the fine sentiments expressed will inspire some of the listeners, but not the obese gentleman in the row behind me, who offered his unsolicited cynical and critical opinions of the celebrity speakers.
Jack, Coberly, has given a description, I agree with. For a value system comes from the community we are born. Be that counting coup or that all life is sacred.
I’m a cafeteria Christian; like and try to abide with the spirt of Christian teaching.
I think that both Beene and Dale missed my point. Of course our value systems are assimilated from the environment within which we have lived and experienced life. To assimilate is to internalize. What is internalized is not fully observable by others in our environment. Beene suggested that fundamentalism and morality are shared concepts. Have one and the other is part and parcel. I don’t think so. Certainly not in all cases, though probably in many cases. Simply having fundamentalist values (is that far different from Tea Party values?) does not result in that individual being committed to morality in interacting with others. I’d go so far as to suggest that those who are most blatant about their commitment to fundamentalism use that loud expression to obscure their less than significant adherence to some level of morality.
Jack,
I wish you wouldn’t go so far as that. The truly amoral are your “capitalists” and politicians. By capitalists I mean the owners of labor who care far less about their worker human beings than they do about an extra five cents profit. And the politicians are perfectly willing to be “fundamentalist” or “progressive” depending on what is going to get them elected.
I think you don’t like fundamentalists, and accuse them of immorality because they don’t quite share your ideas about what is moral. And, I am afraid, that makes you more of a “fundamentalist” than you probably realize.
At least, I see fundamentalism, of any kind, as a near inability to imagine that the other guy’s opinions and values are, in some important sense, as likely to be “true” as yours.
Not that you need to, or can, change your ideas about what is true, but the failure to, or ability to, meaningfully consider that the other guy might be right, or could at least be safely left alone in his error… assuming some modus viviendi can be worked out.
I, because I went to the same schools as you, grew up with the same friends, read the same books… probably agree with you about what is “right” or “moral” in most cases. Where I stop… and it’s not so much with you as with some others not far away… is when you (they) arrogantly assume that you (they) are right and so don’t have to worry about the feelings of others.
And of course I get accused of that all the time. I like to think it is after I have been enormously patient and finally convince myself the other guy is not arguing in good faith, or I need to tell him that I suspect he is not capable of arguing in good faith. But I am as good at self deception as the next guy, and I have notices that any failure of perfect diplomacy on my part is jumped upon with what I regard as truly low life bad manners by those who didn’t like me much in the first place.
Relevant to the thread here is the following. [I will supply the link this evening if there is any demand for it]:
” In Barack Obama’s office, a picture of Lincoln is hanging on the wall. As Senator of Illinois this portrait caused him to write an article entitled: “What I see in Lincoln’s eyes.” One paragraph deals explicitly with Lincoln’s image as the Great Emancipator and how African Americans perceive this legacy:
“”Still, as I look at his picture, it is the man and not the icon that speaks to me. I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. As a law professor and civil rights lawyer and as an African American, I am fully aware of his limited views on race. Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a military document than a clarion call for justice. Scholars tell us too that Lincoln wasn’t immune from political considerations and that his temperament could be indecisive and morose. But it is precisely those imperfections—and the painful self-awareness of those failings etched in every crease of his face and reflected in those haunted eyes—that make him so compelling. For when the time came to confront the greatest moral challenge this nation has ever faced, this all too human man did not pass the challenge on to future generations.””
I (coberly here) could let it stand at that. But I can’t help noting the difference between Obama and Lincoln. All Obama sees is
“Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a military document than a clarion call for justice. Scholars tell us too that Lincoln wasn’t immune from political considerations ” and a little more about Lincon’s morose disposition as a personal fault.
But Lincoln was a Constitutional Lawyer too. And a far better one than Obama: he knew what the limits of the power of the presidency were. He was also a politician.. and a far better one than Obama… he knew how to set the stage for the political climate he needed. The emancipation proclamation was at a level of intelligence and politial and moral courage that Mr Obama has utterly failed to demonstrate, or even realize that he does not possess. Obama, like everyone else here is simply incapable of thinking even one, let alone two or three steps ahead. So he, in the serene knowledge that he is “right” condemns the man who actually accomplished emancipation as being “morose” “political” and not “fully committed” to justice.
Would to god we were all so morose and political and not fully committed to “justice.”
the quote above was from
http://www.asjournal.org/53-2009/abraham-lincolns-attitudes-on-slavery-and-race/
a longer discussion of Lincoln’s “commitment to justice” can be found in
Richard Striner “Father Abraham.”
but most people will content themselves with remembering the sound bites that make them feel justified in whatever opinion they have cherished since it was first sold to them.
Jack, fundamentalism is a religious concept that may inspire us to help our fellow man because we are one community. Tea Party is strictly a momentary political belief (much like economic theories) that the government waste tax money and is too big.
Jack, yes, there are exceptions to all things.